tête-à-tête poses a series of back-and-forth conversations across the photographic and video works of fourteen artists that address social, political and personal mythologies of the black body as constructed and represented in visual media. The work adheres to Ariella Azoulay’s concept of the civil contract of photography, which asserts the photographic image as a relational encounter between subject, photographer and spectator; that in the moment of looking, photographing and being photographed, each party has a responsibility to the informed participation of the other two. This civil contract shifts and reinforces power between the interconnected gazes of the image: the gaze of the subject within or beyond her frame, the gaze of the photographer through the camera’s lens, and the once-removed gaze of the viewer who comes to the image filtered through the artist. It is a coping strategy in the consumption and creation of often difficult and layered visual materials, aptly exercised here under the aegis of racial imagination and visibility in the United States.

One of the works in the show, Lyle Ashton Harris’s Gail and Alex, San Francisco, 1992 (2015) is one of thousands of images from the artist’s 35mm Ektachrome archives from 1986 to 1996, which capture intimate moments of Harris’ friends and lovers during the second wave of AIDS activism. The photographs mark an intersection between civil and gay rights movements at the end of the last century. Through Gail and Alex’s subtle smiles and kind eyes, the audience can readily see the camaraderie and spirit of community between subject and photographer. In shooting from below, Harris monumentalizes these women, forcing the viewer to look up at them as symbols of a time and movement revived today across overlapping activist platforms. Harris reaches into the past through his photographic archive as an allegory of history repeating itself.

Wangechi Mutu’s Shoe Shoe engineers social abjection. The video, a black and white Betacam short with the hazy look of CCTV footage, captures a performance where the artist dresses as a transient and travels down a short stretch of sidewalk, tossing shoes at the disembodied viewer watching through the camera. The title’s play on language—a homophone of the French term of endearment ‘chouchou’—humanizes the subject onscreen, and her apparent homelessness and instability.

Thomas’ Portrait of Sidra Sitting, challenges the etiquette of the reclining nude as an art historical genre after Titian, Giorgione, Goya, Ingres, and countless others; men whose authorial intent coerces their representations of female subjects into the demure propriety of their times. In many ways, the photograph makes visual allusions to Manet’s Olympia, and hybridly stands in conversation with African studio photographers—such as Sedyou Keita and Malick Sidibe—whose black and white portraiture documents colonial histories and their affects. The black body becomes a provocation and challenge of Manet’s already confronting painting. Like Olympia, Sidra looks beyond her frame and meets the eye of her viewer, possessed of herself; Thomas steps aside to allow her subject agency.

In extending her practice into curating, Thomas does the same beyond the frame of the photograph. She welcomes and aligns the work of her colleagues into thoughtful encounters, conceding her voice where their contributions might also articulate a perspective or experience. tête-à-tête is a timely conversation with nuanced inflections of tone about the power of images and how they transfix, subdue, inspire, and challenge us in constructing the black body.

The word “history” comes ultimately from the Ancient Greek word “historía,” meaning inquiry, knowledge from inquiry, or judge. The Greek word was later borrowed into Classical Latin as the word “historia,” meaning investigation, inquiry, research, account, description, written account of past events, writing of history, historical narrative, recorded knowledge of past events, story or narrative. In Middle English, the meaning of history was “story” in general terms. This restriction to the meaning arose in the mid-fifteenth century.

With the Renaissance, older senses of the word were revived, and it was in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the late sixteenth century, when he wrote about Natural History. For him, historia was “the knowledge of objects determined by space and time,” the sort of knowledge provided by memory.

It is Francis Bacon’s usage of the word which serves as a point of departure for The Rest is History at Dimensions Variable. Each of the artists engages with the knowledge of objects, space and time in their own way.

Dina Mitrani Gallery is proud to present a significant collection of signed silver gelatin prints by American artist Lillian Bassman (1917-2012). The exhibition opens on Saturday October 22, 2016 at 7pm, will be on view through December 30th, and is the third collaborative project with Peter Fetterman Gallery, based in Los Angeles.

Bassman’s unique graphic style of photography illustrates feminine mystique and glamour, as well as a courageous artist blurring the boundaries between fashion photography and fine art. Born in Brooklyn in 1917 to Russian intellectual immigrants, Lillian Bassman entered the fashion world after taking a design class taught by the famous art director, Alexey Brodovitch. Noticing her astute visual talents, Brodovitch appointed Bassman as his Co-Art Director in the founding of Junior Bazaar magazine in 1945. In that position, she helped launch the careers of many notable photographers of the century including Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Leslie Gill, Arnold Newman, Paul Himmel and many more. After the publication was absorbed by Harper’s Bazaar, and, at the urging of her colleagues, Bassman began to photograph the models she worked with and quickly developed a body of work that was unlike any other fashion images of the period.

As fashion photography began to evolve into a more direct visual approach, Bassman continually experimented in the darkroom using various bleaching, filtering, and softening techniques, painting with light to achieve her mysterious aesthetic. Along with her contemporaries Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, Bassman’s creative efforts elevated the genre of fashion photography out of the art world shadows. Bassman achieved distinctly feminine imagery by exclusively working with her models either solo, or with female assistants in the studio. This allowed models to be photographed as pure studies of intimate femininity devoid of male-viewpoint eroticism. In addition, Bassman’s treatment of her prints in the darkroom, creating atmospheric and

impressionistic effects, symbolized the mystery and inner grace of her subjects.

In the 1970’s, frustrated with the formulaic trends of fashion photography, Bassman destroyed nearly her entire archive save for a bag of negatives stowed away in a closet. After the work was re-discovered two decades later by photo-historian Martin Harrison, she was encouraged to re- interpret her classic works again using her original darkroom techniques to create a comprehensive body of work in limited editions. Richard Avedon stated of her work, “It’s magical what she does. No one else in the history of photography has made visible that heartbreaking invisible place between the appearance and disappearance of things.” Influenced by Bassman’s graceful style and career longevity, esteemed French artist Sarah Moon produced the short documentary “Something About Lillian”, capturing their mutual bridging of fashion photography and fine art.

In 1996 Bassman went back to work as a photographer and printmaker and in 2004 received the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fashion Photography, following an innovative career spanning five decades. Today her prints continue to awe viewers with their bold, almost charcoal appearance and nostalgic elegance. Her work has been exhibited internationally since the 1970’s including recent shows at the Chanel Nexus Hall, Tokyo (2014) and Haus der Photographie Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2009). Her work has also been recently exhibited at notable galleries throughout the United States.

KaBe Contemporary is pleased to present Untitled booth D5 @ KaBe Contemporary, on view October 22, 2016 - January 31, 2017. Featuring works by artists that are represented by KaBe Contemporary, the idea behind this exhibition is to create a dialogue between these artists and their works which include different media: drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and installation.

Miami, FL — Locust Projects is proud to present The Comet and the Glacier, a new video opera and immersive installation by Pittsburgh-based artist Alexis Gideon. Gideon’s musical compositions, sculpted clay reliefs, glass paintings, stop-motion animations, videos and live performances come to life in his first large-scale installation. These elements reinforce the complex narrative world of the artist’s invention, where reality and fiction are confused and interspersed along the many layers of the story.

At the center of the exhibition is a multi-layered narrative surrounding a peculiar, fictional book titled The Almanac: an unpublished, nineteenth-century manuscript written by the imaginary Swiss author Fredrick Otto Buhler, and recently discovered in the home of his last living descendant. Narrated by an artist character named Alexis—based on Gideon himself—the story presents the dilemma of the protagonist’s impossible recollection of the book’s events. He somehow remembers having read these stories during his childhood in New York City. To test whether he had indeed encountered this mysterious text, the character Alexis writes and illustrates a narrative based on one of the chapters drawn from The Almanac’s table of contents: The Comet and the Glacier. Comparing his and Buhler’s versions, the story—and the project as a whole—approaches memory as a creative gesture. The exhibition draws the audience into the unsettling déjà vu of the base story, punctuating the project’s fiction with real historical events and aspects from Gideon’s own life.

The exhibition transforms Locust Projects into a surreal dreamscape, populated by thepersonal effects and relics from the creation of The Comet and the Glacier and Alexis’ own past, both real and fictive. The narrative is materialized through an immersive environment that brings to life Alexis’ childhood bedroom, where he recalls reading the text; his office, where he works on his own version of the story; and two medieval huts from the manuscript itself. The rooms are points of interaction where the audience encounters one of fiveinterlocking films—mixing Super 8 film, HD video and stop motion animation—created by Gideon, which tell the story of The Comet and the Glacier from opposing perspectives: Bühler’s version, in a hut made of dirt, tells the story from the frame of the glacier and its people, watching as the comet approaches; and the character Alexis’ account, in the straw hut, recounts the narrative from the eyes of the people on the comet watching as the glacier nears.

The Comet and the Glacier, the exhibition, is entered through a museum-like display, which exhibits the glittering clay reliefs made by Gideon, used in the creation of his stop-motion animations. These sculptural works, treated in a wall text as early artifacts in the history of photography made by Bühler for the book, invent a historical timeline in which The Almanac and its creation are to be placed. This space is a gateway between reality and the narrative, where the world of Gideon’s invention bleeds into existence.

Gideon further pushes at the boundary between the real and the imagined with his live activation of the piece. He performs a musical arrangement that corresponds to the videos housed in each of the installation’s rooms, like chapters informing the overall narrative. In moments of virtuosity, the animated characters mouth along in sync to the lyrics sang and rapped by Gideon. He embodies the real and fictional Alexis at once, both part of the narrative and its creator, bridging all the interconnected layers of The Comet and the Glacier.

As a creative complement to The Comet and the Glacier, Locust Projects has published a same-titled illustrated book that vividly captures the colorful imagery of the work, featuring critical essays by three art historical scholars.

ABOUT ALEXIS GIDEON
Alexis Gideon (b. 1980, New York, NY) trained as a composer and performer under the mentorship of avant-garde jazz legend Anthony Braxton. In 2013, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City paired Gideon with William Kentridge in a joint exhibition. The artist has performed his previous video operas at national institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; and internationally at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga, Spain; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and Time Zones Festival, Bari, Italy. His work is held in the collection of the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Lawrence; and a number of private collections. Gideon graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in Musical Composition and Performance in 2003, and currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA.

ABOUT LOCUST PROJECTS
Locust Projects is a Miami-based not-for-profit exhibition space dedicated to providing contemporary visual artists the freedom to experiment with new ideas without the pressures of gallery sales or limitations of conventional exhibition spaces. Local, national and international artists are encouraged to create site-specific installations as an extension of their representative work. Locust Projects supports the local community through educational initiatives and programming that are free to the public.

Locust Projects’ exhibitions and programming are made possible with support from: The Alvah H. and Wyline P. Chapman Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Cowles Charitable Trust; FAENA; The State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural A airs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; The National Endowment for the Arts Art Works Grant; Locust Projects Exhibitionist and Significant Others Members.

HUFFER COLLECTIVE Save Your Selves

Nov 19, 2016 - Jan 21, 2017

HUFFER COLLECTIVE will continue to create their status to annihilate Miami’s status as an “art world mecca for rich tourists”.

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The Flaunting of Youth //
Einar and Jamex de la Torre and Raw Horse Power // Generic Art Solutions

Exhibition Dates:
November 28–
January 14, 2016

Opening Reception //
Monday, November 28th
from 6–9pm

Mindy Solomon Gallery
8397 NE 2nd. Avenue
Miami, FL 33138

P: 786-953-6917

Tuesday - Saturday
11AM - 5PM

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Art Advisory ServicesMADAMADA

MIAMI, FL—Mindy Solomon Gallery presents The Flaunting of Youthby Einar and Jamex de la Torre and Raw Horse Power by Generic Art Solutions (G.A.S.) on view November 28th, 2016 through January 14th, 2017 at the gallery: 8397 NE 2nd Avenue, Miami, in Little River. An opening reception with the artists will take place Monday, November 28th, from 6–9pm.

The opening reception party features Tres Paplote®—a unique boutique mezcal created by Mexican American actor and famed Chicano art collector Cheech Marin. The Tres Papalote® label showcases an image of a glass sculpture skillfully crafted by artists Elinar and Jamex de la Torre. The figurine on the bottle is inspired by the de la Torres' colorful fun-loving work in Cheech’s own art collection.

Capitalizing on their always prescient, tongue-in-cheek perspective on Colonial History, the de la Torres explore a juxtaposition of consumerist gluttony and the Sunshine State population’s obsession with eternal youth and vitality. Utilizing the medium of lenticular technology, Einar and Jamex de la Torre create vibrant images of raw meat, celebrity personas, and historical artifacts to articulate a dizzying array of fantastical images that transition between varying states of reality.

Einar de la Torre states:

“It always surprises us when somebody dies in the US, there are no reminders of death—even the cemeteries look like golf courses and parks. Nowhere else do you see a culture so obsessed with youth. We like to say that America is a young country; America is not so young anymore. Nowadays, it is acting more like a perpetually juvenile middle-ager—immature adults are never a pretty sight, the best example of this is in our current election.

“The fabled Fountain of Youth reflects our national disdain for aging. It is more than a little ironic that Ponce de Leon’s fountain should be situated in Florida, a state that has more than its share of retirees. We believe it is high time we started listening to the wisdom of elders, and started acting our age. Our recent lenticular body of work reflects this, and the parallel topic ‘Sloth’ that is the theme for our next museum exhibit in Aarhus, Denmark (designated cultural capital for the European Union 2017, opening in February).”

Choosing to focus on lenticulars exclusively for this exhibition will be a departure from previous shows, as the brothers have always utilized hot glass as one of their primary media. Expanding their artistic reach beyond the traditional craft realm, they see themselves as representative of the contemporary Latin American artistic vanguard. The de la Torre brothers will be the featured inaugural exhibition at the new Smithsonian Latino Center in Washington, DC in 2018. They have received national and international acclaim and professional recognition, including a USA Artist award, Louise Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, and a Joan Mitchell award.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions:
when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

In their second solo exhibition at the Mindy Solomon Gallery, Generic Art Solutions brings a new and theatrical direction to their work. Having recently completed the prestigious Rauschenberg Residency, the artistic duo focuses on work that challenges the notion of cooperation. A considerable amount of the collaborative duo Generic Art Solutions’ sculptural/performance/video work explores, at its core, the very nature of collaboration itself.

Generic Art Solutions // Streetfighter: Ninjas

Generic Art Solutions // Streetfighter: Ninjas
2016, video still

“Streetfighter: Ninjas” (2016) is a high-octane performance piece that is centered upon conjoined motorcycles that share one front wheel. Though this vehicle cannot be ridden conventionally, it is perfectly designed to perform head to head dual burnouts. The motorcycle is the universal symbol of youth rebellion and freedom, and an icon of the American Dream with loud, smoky burnouts as its exuberant war cry. This performance requires a dance of power, where only precisely matched RPMs, as well as break and clutch control by both riders, results in an extended battle of Raw Horsepower. Neither rider may take the lead—this tango has two leading men—in order to sustain a balance of aggression and surrender. Both Campbell and Vis must maintain constant focus on the other’s actions. It is a head-to-head arms race, a stand-off in smoke and burnt rubber with equilibrium as its ultimate goal.

In addition to the video and the accompanying large scale three-dimensional motorcycle piece, the duo will showcase paintings that focus on twisted motorcycle wreckage that appears sculptural and abstract in its articulation, as well as recent photographic images referencing historical works.

Brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre were born in Guadalajara, Mexico. Jamex in 1960, Einar in 1963. They moved suddenly with the family to Southern California in 1972, going from an all-boys Catholic school to public schools in the beach town of Dana Point. They are presently living and working on both sides of the border with studios in Ensenada, Mexico and San Diego, California. Jamex started flame-working glass in 1977, attended California State University at Long Beach, and received a BFA in Sculpture in 1983. Einar started work with glass in 1980, while also attending California State University at Long Beach. In the 1980s, they ran a flame-worked glass figure business while also developing their assemblage style of work. In the early 90s, they began working collaboratively as studio artists; later in the decade, they began work in installation art with participations in Biennales such as inSITE and Mercosul (Brazil). In the year 2000, the brothers began their work in public art; they now have six major projects completed. They have exhibited their work internationally, participating in exhibits in France, Japan, Canada, Germany, Venezuela, and Brazil, as well as the US and Mexico. Their work is in the collection of the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington; The National Hispanic Center Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Arkansas Arts Center Museum, Little Rock; Arizona State University Art Museum; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Kanazu Museum, Japan; The Fisher Gallery Museum USC, California; Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; and The Mexican Fine Art Center Museum in Chicago. They have taught workshops at institutions such as Pilchuck School of Glass, Penland School of Crafts, Ezra School of Glass in Japan, Build-Work Academy in Bavaria, Jam Factory in Adelaide, Australia, and Northlands Creative Glass Centre in Scotland. Their work is included in the private collections of Cheech Marin, Elton John, Terry McMilan, Sandra Cisneros, and Quincy Troupe among others.

Generic Art Solutions is the collaborative efforts of Matt Vis and Tony Campbell. This New Orleans-based art duo utilizes nearly every art medium as they examine the recurring themes of human drama and the (dis)functions of contemporary society. Always rooted in the performative, they play every character in their work. In their more distilled “duets” we see something of a yin and yang (a balance between individuals that aren’t quite interchangeable), but in their more elaborate stagings the resultant effect is as epic as the subject matter itself. By combining Classical, Romantic, and Baroque compositional elements with contemporary pictorial techniques, they manage to illuminate the common thread that connects past histories with current events. This strategy creates something of a “Déjà Vu effect” that is driven by drama and surreality with traces of levity. In this dialogue between the past and present the viewer realizes several things: 1) that the history of art is inextricably political, 2) that human behavior repeats itself no matter how tragic or brutal, and 3) that this cycle of repetition must be broken so personal and societal progress can be made. Despite all this, their work contains a glimmer of hope—a hope that through thoughtful examination (and armed with a commitment to change) we can indeed forge a better future.

ABOUT MINDY SOLOMON GALLERY
Established in 2009, Mindy Solomon Gallery specializes in contemporary emerging and mid-career artists and art advisory services. The gallery represents artists working in painting, sculpture, photography, and video in both narrative and non-objective styles, and was named one of the Top 500 Galleries Worldwide in Louise Blouin Media Modern Painters 2013 and 2014 annual guides.

The gallery serves as an incubator for dynamic artists establishing their creative voices and exploring a broad range of exhibition possibilities.

MIAMI (October 29, 2016) - Nina Johnson is pleased to announce I Was Going to Call It Your Name But You Didn’t Let Me, Awol Erizku’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Presenting a group of 20 paintings alongside a conceptual sound collage of music and sonic ephemera, Erizku traffics in the space between sound and sight.

The paintings bear the same subject matter: a disembodied hand, poised and manicured, holding a rose—not taking it or giving it, but only holding it. Appropriated from nail salon signage in Los Angeles, where the artist keeps a studio, the hand is both localized and ubiquitous, appearing across the country in interchangeable locales, signifying a variety of ethnicities and communities. Not only is it the first time Erizku has introduced figuration into his practice, it references his repeated use of floral imagery across his multi-disciplinary practice.

Here, the hand is stripped of its relationship to the nail salon, and the surrounding urban landscape. It becomes something to be emptied and repeatedly filled with different colors, both a meditation on post-Warholian production, and a response to color theory recalling Joseph Albers’ pedagogical exercises that influenced Erizku when he was a student at Cooper Union. Painted on sheets of OSB instead of canvas, these fabricated ready-mades are adorned with rolled or buffed-out segments of paint, teetering on the divide between the studio and the street as they respond to different moments in art history, as well as the constantly evolving surface of the city.

Accompanying these works is a mix of pop songs and sound bites from a variety of media, often pulled from Youtube and Soundcloud. This shifting composition teases out different emotions from the paintings, each of which is named after the song playing in the studio when it was completed. The tension between the iterative paintings—each unique, yet similar to the rest—and the unifying force of the music flowing throughout the gallery echoes the experience of listening to music—everyone hears the same song in a completely new way.

Awol Erizku (b. 1988, Addis Ababa) received his B.A. From Cooper Union in 2010, his M.F.A from Yale in 2014, and his recent exhibitions include those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015); The Only Way is Up at Hasted Kraeutler, New York (2014); and has lectured in conjunction with Carrie Mae Weems at the Guggenheim, New York (2014). His solo exhibitions include New Flower | Images of the reclining Venus at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2015); and Bad II The Bone at Duchamp Detox Clinic, Los Angeles (2016). Erizku lives and works in New York & Los Angeles.

Nina Johnson is a contemporary art space in Miami, Florida. Opened as Gallery Diet in 2007, the gallery has produced exhibitions by emerging and established artists from around the world.

Spinello Projects is pleased to present Transitions #3, the Miami debut solo exhibition by New York-based artist Naama Tsabar, running concurrently with Art Basel Miami Beach 2016. Tsabar will present an installation comprised of three evolving bodies of work which examine human sociality and behaviour through the relation of body and space and the underlying role of intimacy and performativity. The locals only preview will take place Wednesday, November 23rd, 7-10pm. A special collaborative performance will take place during the Miami Art Week Vernissage on Friday, December 2nd, at 9:30pm, featuring Tsabar along with four Miami based musicians and New York based sound/performance artist Fielded.

Continuing her ongoing Work On Felt sculptures, Tsabar transfers these works from the floor to the wall with four new variations. These felt works, likened to Post Minimalist art historic works as Joseph Beuys’s felt sculptures or Robert Morris’s cut-felt wall pieces, subverts its expectations: the material is no longer the represser of sound, but the resonating chamber itself. The audience is invited to breach the borders between one’s own body and the artwork; plucking the string, extending or shortening the curvature of the work, emits a sound while provoking an intimate experience between the object and its catalyst.

Transition is a series of canvases in which Tsabar has reconstructed guitar amplifiers and stage monitors by inverting them, reinserting and abstracting their elements as visual components on linen. Colored hook up wires and knobs are threaded and punctured in and out of the fabric, creating new aesthetic compositions. When connected to power, each canvas retains its functional role with a set sound and volume levels. Within the exhibition, Tsabar will also present Barricade #3, a work composed of twelve microphones arranged in a triangle formation, each side's output fed directly through a Transition canvas. The microphones cables line the floor in formal composition, reflecting the path of transmitted sound. The spatial arrangement of the microphone stands act as both barrier and enabler as the performative space is compressed both physically and sonically. Performer and performance are contained inside the borders of the square. Upon activation, sound is transmitted out to the separate Transition works on the gallery walls, then projected back to the center of the space, filling the acoustic environment with resonant frequencies.

A single Transition work will stay unconnected to any sound transmitting device. The dual existence of these sound sculptures is essential to their understanding, as the canvases constantly move from one field of reading to the other. They are visually surreal as they hold a potential for sound and continuously shift, maintaining a constant state of transition.

This site-specific installation explores diverse approaches to customizing architecture, and how one responds to sculptural forms in a personal setting. The project utilizes large sections of carpeting, fabric, plastic, architectural salvage, and various remnants of furnishings in irregular, alternative combinations. Rather than concealing, blocking out light, or providing comfort, these materials become extensions of the walls and influence the experience of moving through the space.

Diaz utilizes scavenged furnishings and architectural elements in specific combinations
that distort the expectations for daily use. Once familiar objects invite the viewer into a surreal, almost menacing fragment of the domestic realm, an observation of common household furnishings that adapt towards other functions. By evoking unfamiliarity between object and viewer, Diaz’s installation resonates as a house that is not here for habitation, while provoking new methods and strategies for claiming space.

The exhibition examines the process of arranging/re-arranging and how the placement of objects in a room or building effects routine interactions within the architecture. Observing different ways of living, traditions, architecture, and collections in the home informs Diaz’s understanding of how individuals respond to sculptural forms in an altered yet common setting.

The exhibition is the first solo show of acclaimed Doha-based artist Aparna Jayakumar in America. We are presenting works from her series Goodbye Padmini, a photographic documentation of the classic Mumbai taxis and the culture around them, which is rapidly disappearing, along with the vehicles. In addition to the photographs, an homage to the iconic vehicle will be installed as a pooja comprised of Padmini material culture sourced by the artist in a recent trip home. On view at the Bakehouse Art Complex November 28, 2016 – January 2, 2017 in the Swenson Gallery. Opening Reception with the artist Monday, November 28 from 7-9pm

Autopia explores the ubiquitous presence of the automobile in contemporary culture. “Autopia” combines the words auto and Utopia to highlight the importance that the car industry played as one of the paramount symbols of progress in the 20th Century. What is its place in contemporary culture? Does car culture remain central to our ideal of progress? In this exhibition, the legacy of automobiles is being reviewed and reassessed through the work of artists from three continents.

The exhibition is divided in four thematic groups, dealing with the central role of cars in the American High/Way of Life, the USA-USSR fight for consumers’ hearts and minds during the Cold War, the impact of automobiles in the natural realm, and the ways in which it has affected human lives, rewriting maps through commerce and migration, and changing urban centers like Miami.

“The overriding desire of most little brats, on the other hand, is to get at and see the soul of their toys, either at the end of a certain period of use, or on occasion straightaway. On the more or less swift invasion of this desire depends the lifetime of the toy. I cannot find it in me to blame this infantile mania: it is the first metaphysical stirring. When this desire has planted itself in the child’s cerebral marrow, it fills his fingers and nails with an extraordinary agility and strength. He twists and turns the toy, scratches it, shakes it, bangs it against the wall, hurls it on the ground. From time to time he forces it to continue its mechanical motions, sometimes in the opposite direction. Its marvelous life comes to a stop. The child, like the populace besieging the Tuileries, makes a last supreme effort; finally he pries it open, for he is the stronger party. But where is its soul? This moment marks the beginnings of stupor and melancholy.

There are other children who must instantly break any toy that is placed in their hands, almost without inspecting it; as to these, I confess I do not understand the mysterious motive which causes their action. Are they seized by a superstitious furor against these tiny objects which imitate humanity, or are they perhaps forcing them to undergo some Masonic initiation before introducing them into nursery life? -‘Puzzling question’1
1 Gross, Kenneth, ed. On Dolls. London: Notting Hill Editions, 2012. Print. “The Philosophy of Toys,” Charles Baudelaire pgs.11-21

Charles Baudelaire, France, 1853

In 1965, on the occasion of the exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, its curator, William C. Seitz, pointed out that the works featured “exist less as objects to be examined than as generators of perceptual responses in the eye and mind of the viewer.” After the Second World War, a trend emerged—both in the art of the times as well as in its market—to stress “perceptual” relationships, while new conceptual relationships were gradually being forged, which Seitz himself was unable to ignore despite the predominant formalist approach that the commercial circuit proceeded to impose from the gallery upon public and private collectors. The same year that “perceptual art” was coined at MoMA and touted in the New York circuit and that Denise René promoted kinetic art in her galleries, one of the first works of conceptual art, One and three chairs by Josef Koluth, was exhibited at the Musée de la Ville de Paris.

A tense, almost promiscuous yet productive situation began to evolve from the connecting points between perceptual responses and those of “the mind,” alienating the aesthetic experience more and more from the binding ties of the artistic object. Thereafter, “art idea” had a growing impact on the rewriting of the rules of the game of art and its institutional circuits. Several offshoots of those experiences led to minimalism, actionism and performance art, to “environments” (as they were then called), installations and interventions in public spaces. Conceptual art went from being a trend to a way of thinking and acting. It is curious to note that the most daring experiences of so-called kinetic art were conceptual, actionist and political in nature.

In art, it is not the same thing to speak of “toy” and of “game.” In one case, we are referring to the object; in the other, to the action and to the spatial relationships between the work and the public. Within the history of art, it is possible to pinpoint those artists who propose to reinvent the rules of the game (which definitely means reinventing art, guaranteeing its return to processes and non-conclusions). There are also those artists who are good players, who stretch the limits, who always make the game more interesting and may even make it better. They are comparable to high-performance athletes. In our opinion, an inventor of games has the same merit as the players who turn a match into a unique event that justly earns its place in history. This exhibition, featuring works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros collection, is made up of exceptional toys, actions, game inventors and players, where some of their main thematic axes intertwine and take on other meanings.

Pioneer art critic Charles Baudelaire was incisive in his writings on the Salons of 19th century Paris. The Frenchman detected a game change and he himself became one of its new founding principles. One of the most important texts on aesthetics and art is a story that he uses as a metaphor —the relationship of children to their toys— to speak on morality in those new founding principles of art and of society. He heralded a path that would evolve into modern art during the first half of the 20th century and crystallize into contemporary art practices and attitudes during the post-WWII and Cold War eras.

The exhibition Toda percepción es una interpretación: You are part of it is a retrospective look from the viewpoint of contemporary issues of art, culture, politics and economics. It seeks to reflect on the successive reconfigurations of the art map in the last few decades, on the displacements and relocations of its primary centers, from Paris to New York, from Venice to São Paulo, from Basel to Miami. It speaks of areas that have succeeded in alternating centripetal or centrifugal forces, where art has relocated its meeting points and its observation points. We also pay attention to the effects of redrawing the financial or political map, with the repercussion it has on how one makes and proceeds in art.

Liliana Porter’s statement, from which we take the title of our research on the collection, sums up the main hypothesis, while simultaneously acting as a hint to the visitor. It alerts him that he will insert himself in certain mental maps, in certain “puzzling questions,” as Baudelaire would say. The concerns are similar, and the counterpoints revelatory, regardless of the fact that they hail from different latitudes or generations. Here, what is more important is the place in the lines of thought where these artists are. From the outset, You are part of it is an invitation to participate actively, not just with the eyes, nor even with the body. Untangling enigmas demands a game of another sort — the “responsive mind.” The great problem of our times, in the era of complex systems, lies in our having to choose between freedom and security. The balance between the two is extremely fragile. If something breaks, we would always wonder the same thing: But where is its soul?

MIAMI, FLORIDA - The de la Cruz Collection presents their 2017 exhibition,
"Progressive Praxis.” By merging a variety of styles and mediums, the works selected
for this year's exhibition mirror contemporary culture while allowing an open-ended
conversation of various interpretations and possibilities. The context of this exhibition
creates a critical understanding of our shifting visual culture.

“Progressive Praxis” considers the impact of preceding art movements and how
contemporary artists conceptually engage with the advancements of technology. Our
society is conditioned to create, disseminate, and alter information as they see fit. The
use of computers as a method of executing work is no longer a game changer for
artists, as there are no traditional boundaries between the virtual and physical. Artists
today embrace technology to overcome the limitations of physicality and past formal art
processes. The artists selected for this exhibition reveal a generational position that is
inherent to an artistic idea and language of their time.

The works in the exhibition create a dialogue between past and present. The exhibit
also emphasizes the relationship between object and space, as the architecture of the
galleries was taken into consideration in framing this exhibition.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA) presents “One Day on Success Street,” a major survey and first American museum presentation dedicated to the renowned German artist Thomas Bayrle. The exhibition traces Bayrle’s exploration of the profoundly complex impact of technology on humans and their environments over the course of his nearly 50-year career and across a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, video, collage, and installation. A centerpiece of the survey will be Wire Madonna, a newly commissioned site-specific installation created for ICA Miami’s Atrium Gallery that sees the artist interpreting the icon of Madonna and Child in steel, marking the artist’s largest sculpture to date. The exhibition marks ICA Miami’s final presentation in the landmark Moore Building, as it prepares for the opening of its new permanent home in the Miami Design District in late 2017.

Featuring some 75 works from 1960s through the present day, the exhibition begins with Bayrle’s handmade representations of highways expressively rendered as elaborate landscapes. In a related series of works, these motifs evolve into modern cities and waves of pedestrians set into interminable grids. At the center of Bayrle’s focus is the experience of the urban citizen and the artist—in works from the 1980s, landscapes and architectures unfold into surreal human figures. Bayrle’s preoccupation with figures like Carlos the Jackal, considered the world’s first terrorist, explore experiences of alienation and trauma. By contrast, works from the series “Feuer im Weizen” (Fire in the Wheat), which incorporates renderings of sexual acts, are expressions of fascination and joy, of mutation and fracture. Characteristic of Bayrle’s references to commercial icons and consumer culture, the works reflect the artist’s interest in the transformation of popular figures in a media-saturated world.

ABOUT THOMAS BAYRLE

Known for his prescient depictions of mega cities and bodies consumed by machines, Thomas Bayrle (b. 1937) is a Frankfurt-based artist whose works spans mediums and movements including Pop, Op, and Conceptual art. His humorous and satirical multi-media works are characterized by “super- forms,” large images composed of repetitive smaller cell-like patterns. His work is influenced by his experience of growing up in post-Nazi Germany, where he trained and worked as an industrial weaver. Other major influences include the Frankfurt School of political and aesthetic theory and his collaborations on corporate identities with international corporations.

The Vesper Project is the culmination of New York City-based Titus Kaphar’s intensive engagement with the imaginary history of the Vespers, a 19th-century New England family who were able to “pass” as Caucasian despite the fact that their mixed heritage made them black in the eyes of the law. Linking the artist to this family is Benjamin Vesper, a mentally troubled man who—inspired by one of Kaphar’s works—reaches out to the artist for help in reconstructing his family’s history. The resulting project interrogates notions of identity, memory, and social constructs. A compelling art installation and imposing sculptural statement, The Vesper Project features the remains of an abandoned Connecticut home into which the artist has incorporated his own work. Through slashing, silhouetting, and whitewashing, Kaphar creates a complex map that compresses time and elides personal histories. The artist’s most ambitious project to date, The Vesper Project features period architecture, gilt frames, a vintage typewriter, a neglected wardrobe, and old photographs, which, in the context of the artist’s intervention, disrupt perception and reality and postulate powerful new realities.

Miami is a city synonymous with body transformation. Our city is famous for morphing and embellishing the human body through surgery, piercings, tattoos, and other forms of modification. However, many forms of body modification used today are not unique to Miami or youth culture. Piercings, markings, and other forms of alteration have been practiced across cultures for millennia. In addition, artists today are experimenting with modification to reflect and convey ideas related to justice, identity, environment, and gender.

Pierce, Mark, Morph explores the piercings, markings and cranial modification in Pre-Columbian sculpture drawn from the Jay I. Kislak Foundation Collection juxtaposed with work by contemporary artists who are utilizing the body as canvas. While the methods may be similar physically, the intent and concepts behind modifying the human form differ greatly.

Matthew Ronay will produce a new installation for Pérez Art Museum Miami’s Patricia Papper Project Gallery adjacent to the museum’s main entrance. Best known for his sculptural work, Ronay creates beautifully crafted objects from wood, fabric, and clay, which range in scale from small free-standing and wall-based sculptures to immersive installations. He draws out the totemic and surreal qualities of objects through his distinctive use of form and color, which conjure traditions of non-western art making and American folk art, as well as spirituality and psychedelia. Ronay's most recent works have seen him transforming the dark, muted palette of his previous pieces into bold, riotous colors that vibrate with glowing energy. Straddling a vocabulary married to modernist abstraction and ritualistic objects, Ronay's sculptures move beyond language and image. They give primacy to the viewer's experience, and reward close observation of the textured and vivid surfaces, orifices, and protrusions that comprise his otherworldly forms.

The Getty Research Institute will present a preview of selections of its upcoming exhibition Video Art in Latin America at the Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation.

The exhibition will be on view from Nov 30 to Feb 4. Video Art in Latin America is part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a collaboration of arts institutions across Southern California that will present more than 70 exhibitions focused on Latin American and Latino art in the Fall of 2017. The exhibition will take place at LAXART with support from the Getty Foundation.

Video Art in Latin America is an exhibition and research project that maps the emergence and development of video art across approximately two dozen artistic centers in Latin America and the Caribbean from the late 1960s to the present day.

For the Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Arts Foundation, curators Glenn Phillips and Elena Shtromberg have selected a sampling of important video artworks from Brazil from the 1970s to the present. These works employ video technology to create powerful observations on art and society. Video pioneers from the 1970s, Sonia Andrade, Anna Bella Geiger, and Leticia Parente, worked during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) and their works demonstrate early attempts to use video to comment on the political constraints faced by artists during that time. More than a decade later, Sandra Kogut’s Parabolic People (1991) is, as the title suggests, a unique parable of the fast-paced, fragmented, and media saturated world of the 1990s. Berna Reale’s Palomo (2012) reveals the arbitrary nature of police surveillance, while Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado’s Century (2011) comments on excessive consumption of the 21st century and the resulting urban chaos it generates. Finally, Rodrigo Cass’s Civiltà Americana (2012) is a subtle investigation of aesthetic forms as video projections. From an earlier reflection on national identity, to a more sustained inquiry into the materiality of form on a projected screen, these artist videos present new ways of understanding the intersection between expanding video technologies and the visual world.​

About Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA:
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at arts institutions across Southern California.

Through a series of thematically linked exhibitions and programs, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA highlights different aspects of Latin American and Latino art from the ancient world to the present day. With topics such as luxury objects in the pre-Hispanic Americas, 20th-century Afro-Brazilian art, alternative spaces in Mexico City, and boundary-crossing practices of Latino artists, exhibitions range from monographic studies of individual artists to broad surveys that cut across numerous countries.

Supported by more than $15 million in grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA involves more than 70 cultural institutions, from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, and from San Diego to Santa Barbara.

Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.

About LAXART:
Founded in 2005, LAXART is Los Angeles’ leading independent contemporary art space supporting artistic and curatorial freedom. The organization is committed to presenting experimental exhibitions, public art initiatives, and publications with emerging, mid-career, and established local, national, and international artists. More information can be found at www.laxart.org. ​

High Anxiety: New Acquisitions presents selections of artworks from 32 artists acquired since 2014, many of whom explore polarizing social and political concerns through a broad spectrum of contemporary artistic practices. In gauging the output and energies of these artists we find creative currents that speak to our shared state of uncertainty, nervousness and pessimism. “Artists help us comprehend and grapple with the critical issues in our lives,” says Mera Rubell. ​

Inspired by the Rubells’ extensive research trips to Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, New Shamans/Novos Xamãs occupies the Foundation’s entire ground floor. Through installations, paintings, photographs, and sculptures, 12 emerging and mid-career artists address universal environmental, social and political concerns. All of the artworks are from the Rubells’ permanent collection. A bilingual English/Portuguese catalog will accompany the exhibition and include text on each of the artists.